White
by condotta
Summary: FG. In which a Shadowman moves on. A crossover with Neil Gaiman's Sandman.


He had done things. 

Stood in the soft, shapeless space between worlds - waiting, watching, choosing. Slipped into forbidden corners, molded his desire with more than wishes and bone, but lives; mortal lives cupped within his hands, tossed over time like runes. He read them, manipulated them. Played them.

_I've been more things than you can imagine._

Incomprehensible things. Terrible, painful, beautiful things.

But he had only ever wanted one thing.

_I know what it starts with. It starts with my grandfather's basement, when I was five years old._

She would, of course, never fully understand how she'd appeared to him on that day. He'd tried to explain to her, but words were shallow in the face of such complexities. So he had shown her the only way he knew how - by pulling her through the looking glass. He would reveal the pieces of himself lying in wait within her, and she would finally know his years of bleeding; how he'd watched stars swell and explode and stretch into shining strands of hair - stared into eyes as deep and untouched as the forests of legend - tasted sunlight for the very first time, and felt places inside himself catch fire and melt -

"Hey."

The voice was vague, disembodied - floating like a stream of bubbles from somewhere to his left. He was incredibly light, as if his pores were full of air, or maybe he was hollow, or perhaps he was a bubble himself...

"_Hey_."

The word invaded his consciousness like a stone, a pinprick to his balloon. He shuddered with the abruptness - the agony - of waking. His chest heaved once, for life, and again, for remembrance.

_Jenny._

His eyes fluttered open, eyelashes dusted with sugar. The sky was an overexposed picture, the world white and featureless as mist, and his heart siezed.

_No_.

"Well, hello there."

Not Jenny.

An object floated into his vision, blurred, and he could distinguish its lines just vaguely: the hoop at the top, the spread arms, the slender stem. The soft cross. The symbol of life. He lay rigid, watching it swing from side to side, and a chill settled over him; an ancient fear that he and the others had long forgotten. The /aljunnu/ feared no god save Odin, but the being standing over him was no god. She was older, inevitable - endless.

"I should have known," Julian said softly.

She was pale - as white as the sky framing her - dressed in black pants and a long black coat, one eye lined with an elaborate mark, dark hair a mess down her back; a sketch in graphic pen. The ankh glinted silver, sharp.

"Well, I'm only here as a courtesy, really," she said. "Because, as you know - " She offered her hand, black-lipsticked mouth smiling above it. "You Shadowmen don't _really_ die."

He stared, hesitating. Then, seeing no other option, grasped her hand.

It was surprisingly warm. Flecks of white clung to his duster, and he brushed at them absently, slowly comprehending what surrounded him in mounds and hills. Snow. Yet, he was not cold. The immense landscape stretched to the horizon without a speck of color, no defining shapes.

"Where am I?" he asked.

She laughed, and it was genuine, without mockery or ill-feeling. "You may be a young whippersnapper compared to the rest of us, Julian, but you're still old school. Did your disappearing act from the material plane warp your noggin a little?"

His eyes swept over the wasteland, and he wiped the hand she had touched against his leg.

"So I'm dead," he said flatly. This was an appropriate hell for a Shadowman.

She made a derisive noise, hands on hips, cocking her head to one side. "I told you - you don't _die_. You can't _kill_ something that was never _born_."

Memories were struggling to breathe within him, searching for air, light. "I don't understand."

She shook her head, like a teacher with a daft pupil. "I'm here for public relations reasons, Julian. I mean, yeah, you died in a general sense - un_making_ you has a way of doing that - but really you just kind of - " She shrugged, motioning up into the air as if tossing fairy dust to the sky. "Changed forms."

The runestave, his name. Liquid diamonds spilling like blood. Hands pulling at him -

_Oh._

She stood patiently, rocking back on her heels as he turned himself in a circle, a whisper winding up from the ground and into his legs, spreading like a caress of southern wind through his being, rippling over his skin. He held his breath, afraid to consider the possibility...

"Been here before, have we?" she asked.

It was legend among legends with the Shadowmen - the land of plenty from which they'd been known to thieve and pillage. Julian himself had done it countless times, not so long ago, in order to beguile the sleeping mind. The sheer audacity of affronting the realm of a being who personified his own tireless existence thrilled him. To steal from this place meant you held within your hands the fates of human lives, and perhaps non-human as well, for every creature who ever rested its head came here in one form or another.

The Dreaming.

His voice was hushed. "He asked you to come."

"Very good!" She clapped her hands together, pleased. "Usually, he wouldn't bother with you. He doesn't like Shadowmen very much." Dropping her voice, as if they could be overheard in this barren land, where even echoes seemed to be swallowed, she added, "But you're different, or so he says." She did not seem convinced.

He felt raw, elemental, his body responding to the air, the ground beneath his feet. "Different?"

She sighed, hands in her pockets, bracing against a nonexistant wind. "Look, I've seen a lot of obsessive love affairs in my day, Julian. I've seen cities leveled, entire planes of reality altered because person X would possess person Y at any cost. Same story, same flaws, and ultimately it all ends in the same mess." Her foot traced the snow. "And sometimes, it ends in me."

"But I'm not mortal," he said.

"After that stunt with the kissing cousin, I sure_ wish_ you'd been." She flicked at her black nail polish, shooting him a glare. Then, rubbing her palms together, she smiled again. "Besides - what does that mean, 'But I'm not mortal'? Do you think the universe makes exceptions for you?"

He didn't respond. He was thinking of having freedom at his fingertips, lives in his grasp. Of playing the Game.

She cleared her throat pointedly. "You know, my brother once sent a woman to Hell for rejecting him. It didn't make him mope any less, and her mind wasn't changed."

"I don't expect you to understand what it feels like to be alone."

She laughed then, a whimsical sound. "Of course I understand, Julian." Her eyebrows lifted. "I'm Death."

There was no purpose in arguing with an idea. They were too pragmatic. Suddenly, sharply, he had insight into how Jenny must have felt during their conversations.

"Then what makes me different?" he asked.

"From the other Shadowmen? You don't need me to answer that."

"Maybe I do." He added, as an afterthought, "Please."

She squinted up into the sky overhead, nose wrinkled. There was a long, thoughtful pause before she finally spoke. "Knowing what you know now, feeling what you've felt - was there really any other option? Could you really have gone back to watching her from the shadows"

The answer was no, and an emptiness constricted in his chest one million times over from the hour he had known Jenny was lost to him - when he knew Tom Locke had won. An invisible blade sliced through his abdomen, and he fell to his knees in the snow, eyes shut tight against the white of his own grief, his fury.

Years of being beyond reach, clinging to those intimate moments where it was only he and Jenny. Alone. It didn't matter whether she knew he was there, because he was - always had been, watching her change with each passing day, from the innocent, wide-eyed five year old with scraped knees into the fierce, golden young woman who'd resisted him until the very last.

_You are my first, and you will be my only._

Those moments - gone. Mist.

He clenched his teeth, and reached out, finger poised, trembling. He slashed three times, and lines cut into the snow with all the force of his desire behind it.

"_Uruz_," he whispered.

Nothing. The rune lay dormant. Blank.

Just as quickly as grief had overwhelmed, this new revelation brought a variable calm. He sat, aware of the innate power in the terrain, comprehending his ability to draw upon it, and yet being unable to charge such a simple magic.

She knelt before him, and he watched her wipe the snow clean with careful, almost reverent movements.

"There is no veil to pierce here," she said. "No worlds." She began to draw. "It's a gift, you see." She sat back, hands on knees. "She returned your love the only way she knew how. And that's a lot more than most can claim."

Julian's eyes were bright, burning. "But not enough."

A ghost of a smile. "You'll feel differently soon."

His gaze drifted down to the snow. There was a rune carved there, like a primitive P.

_Wunjo._ The rune of wishes, successful journeys, the ideal of perfection.

He stared at it for a long while. He thought of Jenny in the well, Jenny wading through the water in the Tunnel of Love and Despair. Jenny clasping his hands, no tricks, no Game.

"I am my only master," he said quietly, and the rune responded, scorching the snow, an ember set into ice.

Death rose.

"He's waiting."

_Maybe you'll dream about me sometime and that will help me get there_.

_I will. I'll dream you into a place without any shadows, only light._

He followed her as they headed into the white.


End file.
